This week’s Spotlight is on Kang Zhang, a PhD candidate in Electrical and Computer Engineering at Johns Hopkins University. His interests include GPU-accelerated biomedical imaging. Here’s an extract from our interview:

NVIDIA: Kang, what are you working on at Johns Hopkins?Kang: My current research focuses on interventional Optical Coherence Tomography (OCT) technology for microsurgery.

Conventionally, visualization during microsurgery is realized with a surgical microscope, which limits the surgeon’s field of view and causes limited depth perception of micro-structures and tissue planes beneath the surface. Such issues commonly exist in many kinds of microsurgeries, such as ophthalmic surgery, neurological surgery and otolaryngologic surgery.

OCT is a new imaging modality capable of non-invasive 3D micrometer-resolution imaging, which makes it highly suitable for guiding microsurgery. As part of my PhD work, I developed an ultra-high-speed, real-time OCT imaging system using a hardware-software platform based on GPU technology.

A new report by the National Research Council concludes that “the end of dramatic exponential growth in single-processor performance marks the end of the dominance of the single microprocessor in computing. The era of sequential computing must give way to a new era in which parallelism is at the forefront.”
- See: http://bit.ly/hYqH2H

International Exascale Software Project
The goal of IESP is develop a plan for producing a new software infrastructure capable of supporting exascale applications. The most recent meeting was held on Apr. 6-7 in San Francisco.
- See: http://bit.ly/huWMlE

UGENE Wins Award
UniPro7’s UGENE won an award for the "Efficient Use of GPU Accelerators to Solve Large Problems," sponsored by T-Platforms. UGENE is a free cross-platform genome analysis suite optimized by GPUs.
- See: http://ugene.unipro.ru/index.html

"The BioIT World Expo took place in Boston last week. The event brings together approximately 2000 life sciences, pharmaceutical, clinical, healthcare, and IT professionals from around 30 countries to share information and discuss the technologies that are driving biomedical research and drug development.

The bioscience community is tasked with perhaps some of life’s biggest challenges, from drug discovery to developing an overall better understanding of the human body. In these quests, computation is a researcher’s most important tool, enabling them to run larger and more accurate simulations as well as test a wider range and variety of laboratory-style scenarios.

These two worlds converge in the field of bio-IT, and it is in this field where the parallel processing power of NVIDIA GPUs is having a profound effect.”

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